61 seconds in a minute
by gibbsheroic27
Summary: Life can change in an instant. Life can change in an hour. Life can change in a lifetime. Life can change in all those things, all rolled into one.


A season 4 episode 1 response fic, so spoiler alert! Inspired by miss-nettles-wife's brilliant fic. Chapter 1 of two or more.

Sixty-one seconds. One single instant over a minute. That's all it was, Charlie learns later. All the time it took for his life to be flipped upside down for the fifth time in his twenty-seven years on the earth.

CC

He started counting those events as far back as he could remember, a crumpled telegram hitting the rotted wood of the tenement floor, falling from small, stubby, meticulously clean fingers. Charlie had just learned his letters, the first one in his year to be able to make sense of the squiggles etched out of the chalkboard in Mrs. Clarke's scrawling hand. Charlie had been so proud.

Looking back, Charlie always finds it hard to feel anything but loathing for the woman who taught him how to read, or how to decipher code, depending on what you can really reasonably consider legible in the handwriting spectrum. He never quite stops feeling back about that. He never manages to change the association though.

Intellectually, Charlie figures out that blaming your school mistress for teaching you to read rudimentary English just in time for you to be able to proudly decipher the words KILLED IN ACTION on a laminated, perfectly squared bit of yellow card paper, announcing them to your harried mother in a piping squeak of triumph fast enough to allow her reaching hand to arch into a perfectly aimed slap without even halting it's smooth flow through the stale, onion tinged air of the hall, is completely illogical around his seventh birthday.

But his teacher is Mr. Jones by that point, who spends rather more time strapping students than he does smoking, and is significantly less time again than he spends actually teaching, so he keeps this revelation to himself. His mother still isn't speaking to him when she introduces his brothers to their new step-father later that same afternoon. Charlie never mentions Mrs. Clarke again. Or his father.

He never quite stops blaming himself anymore than he listens to logic enough to ever stop hating Mrs. Clarke. Or school. Or himself.

CC

The hand is warm on his shoulder, the ripping force of it somehow rather less than strange counterpoint to the gentleness. Everything about Lawson is rather like that, Charlie reflects dimly as his world rights itself just enough for reality to surface into his cloudy vision.

Charlie has never had a very high pain tolerance, despite his mother's best efforts. He screamed like bloody murder the first time she spilled hot tea on his hand.

Shattering three ribs somehow completely misses his notice as he watches Lawson careen over the top of the car, hitting the ground with a surprisingly soft thunk. Charlie is at his side before the strangled "Boss!" finishes passing his sticky, foamy lips, his hands refusing to even hesitate in their bid to just do something.

Charlie has never been more grateful for Lucien bloody Blake in the moments that follow, his strangled cries of Help a stark contrast to the surety of his hands, the soft litany of instructions making his movements as sure as his digits are shaky. _Apply a tourniquet if pressure isn't possible, don't upset the fracture more than you absolutely can help, mind the bone if it punctured the skin, don't try to apply pressure unless you're out of options, always remember to keep a clear head, calm, focus, access the injury, then tend to the patient._ "God shut up Doc!"

It's out of his lips at the exact moment that "help" finally arrives in the person of a rather grease stained driver who takes one shell-shocked look at Charlie's desperately twisted snarl, Lawson's writhing stilling at an alarming rate under his slightly shaky hands, and darts swiftly towards the wall mounted telephone that is a rather ostentacious example of the startling good fortune that the garage someone choose to run two coppers down outside of is actually owned by one of the richest men in Ballarat.

Charlie has never been more grateful for a Tyneman in his life. And somehow that's when he starts to laugh. It's breathless at first, but by the time the ambulance men arrive, he's huddling close to Lawson's drawn, still form, desperately attempting to stifle raucous laughter enough to maintain his grip on the belt encircling the Boss' thigh.

The ambulance has just enough room for both of them and the two attendants, which proves to be a godsend, as it takes the attendant the entire ride to the hospital to detach Charlie's fingers from his own belt buckle.

By the time Lawson's loaded onto a stretcher and disappearing into a sea of off white and slightly scared faces, Charlie's laughter has mercifully turned to tears.

It makes it a lot easier to disappear into the hallway woodwork that way.

Charlie is carefully counting the tiles at his right toe when Blake sweeps through the doors, moving with the power walk that eats ground faster than Lawson's best swagger. Charlie used to love comparing their times to a scene. A peal of rather inappropriate laughter rips through his lungs, drawing Blake's already laser sharp gaze in his direction like a bee seeking its hive.

"Charlie!" Blake's wearing the sweater Mrs. Beazley knitted for him at Christmas. He never wears sweaters to work. Charlie wonders vaguely if he'll have to start calling her Mrs. Blake now. That sounds so odd. He's not sure if he wants a step-mother.

It takes until long after Mattie has halted the Doc's forward momentum with a frantic "Lucien!", long after the Doc hesitates for a painful moment, his hand less than a foot from Charlie's head, his knees locked into the start of a crouch, before Lawson's pained cry as a ridiculously young doctor attempts to move Charlie's makeshift tourniquet snaps Blake on a new course, a long time after Blake's disappeared down the off white corridor through a sea of double doors with a hasty, "I'll be right back Charlie" thrown over his retreating frame that Charlie realizes he said that last part out loud.

It's an even longer time before he realizes that the strange look in Blake's eyes the instant before he made a decision and turned away from Charlie had nothing to do with Charlie's words, and everything to do with the slight froth of red painted across Charlie's chin.

CC

Charlie wasn't trying to check his watch, not really. He'd just finished binding Lawson's leg, and his wrist caught slightly on something, Lawson's coat he registers vaguely in hindsight. He remembers shaking his arm desperately in an attempt to get it free without tearing an even larger groan from the Boss. He doesn't quite succeed, and the ensuing noise rips his gaze upwards towards Lawson's pinched face. He never quite remembers why he notices the hands of his watch. Or how he knew what time this all started.

He just knows that the one thought that runs around his head like a rat caught in a barrel for days afterwards is that in took just a moment over a minute for the whole world to tilt on its axis.

It took a moment longer than it took the last four times.

And just like when he was six years old and so proud to be able to read out words with to idea as to their meaning, he still has no idea how to right it again.


End file.
